Rachel Caine: Two Weeks' Notice

The guard hit the controls, and the gates began to roll back. Bryn hit the brakes, slowing fast, but even; then the front right bumper of the car caught the metal and crumpled. The car scraped through, but only just, and then the guard reversed the course of the gates behind them to wheel them shut as Bryn brought the vehicle to a skidding stop.

And then, of course, heavily armed guards surrounded the car as it came to a stop—a battalion of them, looked like. Bryn dropped the phone, killed the engine, and held up both hands. Annie looked frozen in place. “Pretend like you just got busted by the cops,” Bryn said. “Do exactly what they say. Don’t argue, don’t resist.”

Annie tentatively raised her hands, too. The dogs were all barking excitedly, except for the pug, who was now cowering on the floor between Annie’s feet and next to Mr. French. He just looked like he wanted some peace and quiet.

Bryn’s and Annie’s doors were pulled open at the same time, and Bryn popped her seat belt so the guard who reached in could pull her free without effort and send her facedown to the pavement. Annie hit the ground on the other side of the car. Mr. French bailed out and started trying to bite the guard holding Bryn, but he was kicked aside.

“Run!” she screamed at Mr. French. He took a step back from her, looking confused. “Run, you stupid dog!”

He wouldn’t have, Bryn thought, but then one of the guards tried to grab him, and that sent him fleeing.

Chasing something was what the greyhounds did for a living, so they jumped out of the open car door and took off in graceful leaps after him, followed by the pug. The Rottweiler followed, leaving Maxine still in the cage. She was snarling and fighting to get out.

The fleeing dogs ran for the parkland and woods beyond the building. Someone fired a shot, but it missed.

“Don’t hurt them!” Bryn turned her head to yell. “You sons of bitches!”

“No need for that,” said a voice from somewhere over her head, and she looked up to see the CEO of Pharmadene walking quickly toward them, trailed by his assistant, Jeremy, and a couple of others. “Nobody will hurt the dogs.” He looked at the guard who had her down on the ground. “Let her stand up.”

The guard held to the letter of the order, but he slipped handcuffs on her just to be safe. Zaragosa didn’t object. He looked tired, Bryn thought, and careworn. Presiding over this place, keeping all these secrets, probably wasn’t a restful occupation.

“Now,” he said. “You want to tell me what’s so critical you had to pull a stunt like that just to see me?”

“Sir, we should get this car out of here. It wasn’t scanned properly,” a man at his side said—from his badge, he was some kind of high-level security officer by the name of Robinson. “Should I kill this dog?”

“No need,” he said, and gestured to Jeremy. “Let the dog go. Outside the gates.” He gave Bryn an apologetic half smile. “I love dogs. I’d have it brought inside, but we really don’t have any facilities for animals, other than in the labs. I assume you don’t want it there.”

“ Hell no,” Bryn said. The idea of seeing the dogs, especially her dog, in those cages made her shudder. She watched Jeremy pick up Maxine’s crate and hold it at arm’s length while the dog barked and snarled, and walk it toward the fences where the other dogs had disappeared. “He should watch out. She’s in a bad mood.”

“Mine isn’t doing too well, either, so why don’t you tell me what you want, Bryn?”

“Do you really want to talk about this now? Right here?” Bryn asked. “Because I can promise you, there will be something I say that all these people aren’t cleared to hear.”

Zaragosa considered her for a long second, then nodded and turned to Robinson. “Search and clear them, then bring them down to the conference room. C-17. I want badges on both of them, and two escorts each. Armed.”

That seemed extreme, but Bryn could see his point; she and Annie had just obtained access by threat to what should have been a highly secure government facility. If he was taking them inside, he’d do it cautiously. That was only good sense.

Of course, the safest thing to do would have been to shoot them in the heads and drag them back outside the fences to recover, but luckily, Zaragosa wasn’t quite as cold-blooded as Bryn herself was.

Not yet, anyway.

She and Annie didn’t resist the searches, although Annie made some smartly worded comments about hands in places she hadn’t invited them to go; Bryn, who’d recently undergone a cavity search by Patrick McCallister’s wife , didn’t much care. She listened to the lectures on security procedures, indicated her agreement, and got escorted to the elevator along with Annie and four armed personnel.

She expected to go up to the executive offices.

Instead, the elevator went down . Instead of showing the spacious atrium view, suddenly the glass walls were full of views of concrete. Bryn felt claustrophobia setting in, and a scraping sense of worry. “I thought we were going to a conference room,” she said. Robinson was one of the four security personnel, and he sent her a sideways glance.

“You are,” he said. “C-17. It’s belowground.”

It was part of the lab complex. As the doors opened on thick glass, white walls, familiar awful white walls , Bryn felt the worry turn to a sickening flood of dread and panic, but she breathed in slowly and tried to keep it at bay.

They walked right past the white room with the drain, the one where she’d been confined to rot. It was sparkling clean. If anyone had died there, had their decayed flesh scrubbed off the tiles and washed away, there was no sign of it.

This was not right . Bryn felt it stinging all over her, and the sharp, bitter taste of fear filled her mouth like acid. “I want to talk to Riley Block,” she said, and resisted a little when they tried to hurry her along. “Get her!”

Robinson said, “No can do. Agent Block has been reassigned to another project.”

“Reassigned?” Bryn repeated. “When? By whose order?” There was no way that would happen, unless Riley herself had requested it, or something spectacularly bad had blown up in her face, politically speaking—bad enough to need a scapegoat at the highest levels. Riley might hate the assignment at Pharmadene, but she’d never walk away from it—and the government wouldn’t let her, because they didn’t need more eyes on those top secret files than were strictly necessary. Riley was read in. She’d stay.

“Sorry—don’t know the details, lady. Above my pay grade,” Robinson said, and led them past doors marked with lurid biohazard stickers, secured with keypads and scanners. Nothing was marked, except with numbers. He paused at C-17, which didn’t have any warnings on it, and keyed in a code to open the door, then ushered Bryn and Annie inside.

This isn’t right, Bryn thought. Not right at all. She had a terrible, sickening sense of having made the worst choice of her life…and it was too late, way too late, to change it.

To Bryn’s huge relief, it was a conference room, after all; she’d been half-expecting some kind of vivisection lab with autopsy tables. Or that furnace, that horrible furnace.

This wasn’t the showroom conference room, either; it held a battered long table, some less-than-new chairs, and whiteboard walls with dry-erase markers scattered randomly over every surface. Some of what had been scribbled there remained ghostly on the surface, even after cleaning. Formulas. Equations. Molecular drawings.

Zaragosa, already seated at the table, nodded to Robinson and said, “You stay, Pete. Bryn and—Annalie, right?—please sit down. The rest of you, outside.” Meaning that the three extra security guards were firepower, but not cleared all the way for the kind of conversation they were about to have. Robinson obviously was.